Barack Obama ran on the promise of "change you can believe in". His personal appeal to millions of voters put him in office despite only superficial discussion of what changes Obama would institute while in office versus the changes he would be responding to as capitalism and the American Empire wither and die.
After a few weeks in office, it is already clear that Obama is supremely confident in himself. But his confidence is like that of comic/politico performer Stephen Colbert. Obama claims, for instance, that he will create millions of new jobs, but he has failed to explain his calculations. He has promised catastrophe if his plan was not enacted, but he has failed to demonstrate through empirical analysis that the implementation of his plan will prevent catastrophe or that it will change the dynamics of how financial catastrophe affects the "little man" and the working man of America.
Various analysts, such as economist Michael Hudson has done a analysis that show Barack Obama’s plans are themselves catastrophic. Should his electorate support Obama on blind faith?
It is already clear that Barack Obama is short-changing his electorate in terms of pre-election promises. He has put caveats in his promises to end torture and extraordinary renditions so as to make his statements on these subjects exactly as hollow as the statements of George W. Bush and his henchmen. After all, if you were to listen to Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Gonzales, etc., you were told that American does not torture, just like Obama is now claiming that America will not torture. But Obama’s words already ring hollow in view of the caveats that he put into his policies.
Barack Obama lambasted the Bush Administration as being wasteful and inefficient and even dumb, but he cannot quite bring himself to call their actions "illegal", though numerous international experts have called for criminal prosecutions for violations of human rights, crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the U.S. Constitution and other illegal behaviors that merit serious prison time for the previous administration.
The U.S. Government in general has had no reluctance to pursue Islamic charities and their financial webs under the theory that to properly stop wrong doing by these people one must "follow the money". The U.S. Treasury has tracked these organizations through webs of organizational structure and to the ends of the earth and had no compunction about seizing funds, seizing bank accounts, and shutting down organizations altogether when they were assumed to have merely contacts and personnel ties with questionable characters associated with "terrorism". Why, then, could the Obama administration not track Hank Paulsen and Goldman Sachs and ALL the bank officials who took seriously huge personal payoffs from taxpayer relief to their struggling banks and financial entities. Why is Obama pretending that there is nothing he can do to retrieve their illicit gains.
Maybe. if Obama would take U.S. bankers and financial officials and give them Iranian names, he could get the motivation to act against them.
Barack Obama is putting on a good show for America. But already many Americans are realizing that it is a shallow display and a superficial one.
The change that is unraveling day by day in America is actually beyond Obama’s control and his solutions will be about as effective as the little boy who put his finger in the dike until the dam burst and the boy and his whole town were lost.
Barack Obama needs to tell America the truth. He needs to tell them exactly what his plans are and how they work and who they benefit the most. He needs to be wise and be a leader and not a figurehead. He needs to think of the Biblical character Noah if he chooses to consult scripture and then ask himself how much of the evil world of his day Noah tried to preserve before the deluge wiped it all away. Anything less will be short-changing the American people and time is running out.
